The Internet gives you access to a worldwide audience; if only they can find you. Discover how to increase search engine traffic to your pages—on Websites, blogs and forums—by understanding and writing about what people are searching for
Recently I was involved in an exercise to identify a new content management system (CMS) for a Web-based business.
As part of that, I investigated search engine rankings, what drives search-based traffic to Websites and, more importantly, why content fails to get good search traffic. This piece is a direct outcome of that effort.
| What are people searching for? |
| According to wordtracker.com, on the night of his historic nomination by the Democratic Party as their candidate for the US presidential elections, there were 3,391 queries in search engines for Barak Obama. On the same day, Paris Hilton got 69,633 searches. iPhone generated 27,087 searches, while “food crisis” got just 442. “Porn” got a whopping 1,153,044 searches, while God was searched for just 67,811 times! Obviously, people may not be doing what you think they are! And they are not going to be searching for what is important to you, but for what is important to them. |
To improve search-based traffic to your Website or blog or forum, you need to work at two levels—at the server level, in the structure, makeup and design of your content management system, and at the article level, in the way an individual piece is written. Both are equally important. This is written from the writer’s perspective: How to write articles or pieces that can attract good search engine traffic. This is not about search engine optimization (SEO), which is a specialized profession in itself. I am talking about what the writer needs to do to improve search engine traffic to her or his pieces.
On the Net, traffic comes from three sources. The first lot is fans of the particular site or the author, those who know your site or even you by name and come in directly. The second are those who come to your piece following links to it from other sites. And the third are those who are directed to the particular piece by search engines. For a decent site, traffic from a search engine should be at least a third to a half, if not more, of all traffic.
Search engine traffic does not come to a site as a whole, or only to its home page. It comes to specific pages within the site. Collectively, all such pages drive the site traffic up. It is up to the individual articles (and not the site as a whole) to draw search engine traffic. So, it is important that every piece at a site be able to draw its share of traffic from the search engines.
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| We should not miss the wealth of information that you can gain for your business by looking at search data. Let us for example, look at the trends for the keywords venture capital, PE, private equity, and VC for India for the last twelve months. OK. PE has been the most searched word. That was easy. Now look at the bar graphs that give the relative volumes of search from different states and cities. If you are in the equity funding business, the areas that you should focus on are clearly visible here. And hey, did you know that so many people from Mahape (a suburb of Navi Mumbai) were recently searching for these terms? Are you missing out something there |
In the days of the printed word, getting the reader to pick up the piece was not your job as the writer. That was for the media buyer in case of an ad or for the circulation department in the case of magazines and newspapers. In today’s search engine centric world, that power vests with you, the writer. Good search engine rankings and search traffic is as much a function of how the site is structured and managed as it is of how the individual articles are written. In fact, there is only so much that administrator-level tricks can do. More power lies in the hands of the individual authors.
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| Search for a particular phrase could come from the most unexpected of sources. In this example, topping the search for Shah Rukh Khan in Google is Pakistan and Morocco, and not India. |
How search engines send traffic to your page
To write articles that get better search traffic, we need to understand how traffic comes from search engines in the first place.
The process starts when someone, like you or me, types in a search phrase into a search engine like Google or Yahoo. The engine looks into its database of pages to see which ones have that word or phrase in them. The engine then displays these articles in a particular order. It is important to get your article up front in response to relevant searches and also to get it displayed higher up, to increase clickthroughs.
Google decides the order in which to display results using a score called PageRank. According to googleguide.com, “Google considers over a hundred factors in computing a PageRank and determining which documents are most relevant to a query, including the popularity of the page, the position, and size of the search terms within the page, and the proximity of the search terms to one another on the page… Google gives more priority to pages that have search terms near each other and in the same order as the query.”This is the key to higher search engine traffic to your article.
Simply put, the keywords that people are searching for have to be there in your piece for it to show up in the results. The more of the keywords you have, the more frequently you have them and the earlier in the article you have them, the better your chance for showing up early in the search results. Here, it is important to note that if you fake it, that is, if you use keywords that are not relevant to the piece or stuff your piece just with keywords, search engines can penalize (blacklist) not just the article, but the entire site. And getting out of a search engine blacklist is time- and resource-consuming and often frustrating.
advertisement Businesses turn to search engine optimization firms more and more in order to achieve top results without the perpetual payment requirement of pay per click marketing. |
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written by Ravnitkaur, October 21, 2009
written by Yameer Adhar, March 07, 2009
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